Barclays vs. RBC Capital Markets Quant Trading?
Hi all,
Received offers for 2025 Quantitative Trading Analyst roles at Barclays and RBC CM, wondering which one I should take. Some things I've been considering:
Pros for Barclays: bigger company & name, very strong in certain desks (can out-compete several top prop shops in market making on credit/FI assets I believe), relatively meritocratic progression (my interviewers moved from associate to MD in < 5 years, citing that promotion is just based on PnL), some very smart people (all my interviewers had PhDs in pure math)
Pros for RBC CM: not a client facing role (i.e. prop. trading) so you don't make trades on behalf of a third party, better culture and environment, seems to be less restrictive (i.e. junior trades can start taking on risk and PnL early on)
Long-term goals are to move to HFT/OMM at a prop shop on the buyside.
Thanks!
Congrats. When did you interview for these?
It seems like with RBC you're starting on the buyside
Thanks. Superdays were early - mid April, so relatively recently. Agree that RBC's quant group functions like an independent buy-side shop within RBC, so likely going to take it.
I work at a hft firm (mid size). We get lots of applications from the sell side quants, they usually have experience in pricing some complex products, otc derivatives trading, eFx, portfolio risk etc. Nothing of this is relevant to us, as a hft quant your number one priority is to generate revenue, all else does not matter especially your phd. What you should be good at is coding (mostly python, sometimes c++), stats/ml, be able to build robust pipelines and my personal kink is having experience with building an automated strategy end to end from scratch (doesn't matter if profitable or not). So prop trading at RBC would be better for your end goal, but IMHO more relevant for the buy side.
what teams?
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